The Thrill Book Sampler

by Seabury Quinn

  The second member of our entourage to be driven out by the stone interloper was our cook, Nora McGinnis. Nora, who was a veritable virtuoso at the kitchen range, had been with us since our second month at housekeeping, and was at once Betty’s pride and the neighbors’ despair. She was devoted to Betty and me, too, so much so that offers of higher wages from several nearby households had been productive of nothing more than indignant refusals from her and severed diplomatic relations by Betty.

  However, Nora was too thoroughly Celtic to be able to share the same roof with that Oriental abomination. Before Chang’s murder she had sidled by it like a stray cat passing a group of boys on a snowy day, after that she crossed herself devoutly each time she had to pass through the hall. Finally she came to Betty and announced her intention of leaving forthwith.

  “Oi’ve cooked fer yez an’ Oi’ve washed fer yez, an’ Oi loiks ye bot’,” she explained, “but that there haythen thing out there”—she jerked her thumb toward the hall—“wunk its oye at me whin Oi came through there jest now, an’ Oi’ll not shlape another noight in th’ same house wid it, so Oi won’t!” And she didn’t.

  If a predisposition to baldness and three years of married life hadn’t rendered the operation well-nigh impossible, I should have torn my hair. “See what your precious image has let us in for now,” I stormed at Betty. “First he kills Chang, then he drives Nora off, and now I suppose we’ll all have to die of starvation.”

  Betty pursed her small lips stubbornly. “I’ll do the cooking myself until we can get another maid,” she promised.

  “Please, Betty,” I besought, “let’s go to a hotel and board until the new cook comes.” I had to spend the rest of the morning explaining that remark to a very much insulted wife. But we went to the hotel just the same.

  We menaced our digestions with hotel fare for nearly a week before we managed to secure a Swedish girl who cooked our meals, broke our best china, and regarded the stone image with an equal degree of bovine indifference. The very sight of her passing the hateful thing with never the tribute of a sidelong glance had a steadying effect upon my nerves which more than atoned for the havoc her clumsy hands wrought among our Royal Minton cups and plates. After observing her indifference for a week or so, I, too, got so that I could go by the stone monster with no more than a shrug of disapproval.

  The violence of my aversion to the image might have simmered down to nothing more than an artistic distaste if Betty’s infatuation had not seemed to increase in geometrical progression as time went by. She would stand gazing at its ugly painted face for minutes on end, almost in a state of hypnosis, till I grew actually jealous.

  If it had been a piece of noble Greek artistry claiming her admiration I could have understood and condoned her love for it, for Betty is an aesthetic little person, with an intense appreciation of the beautiful. But her regard for this carven Calaban— “Upon my word, my dear,” I told her one day, somewhat nettled by her attitude, “I do believe you’re letting that Eastern nightmare make an idolatress of you.”

  Betty laughed, a little nervously, I thought. “I don’t know what there is about the thing that’s so fascinating,” she confessed. “Sometimes I think I hate it as much as you do, Phil. But”—she hesitated a second, as if doubting the wisdom of taking me into her confidence—“but sometimes, when I look at it for a while I dofeel as though I ought to go on my knees before it.”

  “And if I ever catch you doing such a trick,” I said, “I’ll be up in police court next morning for wife beating.”

  It was a few days after this conversation that I was puzzled and annoyed by a faint odor of Chinese punk hanging in the air of the dining room when I came down to breakfast.

  Incense of all kinds is distasteful to me; so much so that I never attend high-church services when I can avoid it, and of all the scents with which the nose of man is insulted I particularly detest that of Chinese punk. Even as a pretext for keeping away mosquitoes we have never burned joss sticks in the house, yet there the scent was, as plain as cabbage on a New England Thursday.

  I sniffed the air like a restive hound for a few moments, then concluded that my olfactory nerves had been playing a practical joke on me, and dismissed the matter from my mind.

  But the odor persisted. Some days it was more pronounced than others—occasionally it was so faint as to be no more than a reminiscent annoyance—but always it was present.

  There seemed to be a subtle connection, too, between the varying strength of the perfume and Betty’s health. On mornings when the bitter-sweet effluvium hung like an invisible fog among the rafters of the hall and dining-room ceilings there were great, violet circles against the white flesh beneath her eyelids, and her eyes themselves were dull and lackluster, as though she had been troubled in her sleep. As the pungent tang of the incense waned and faded from the house, her face regained its wanted color, and the old-time sparkle returned to her eyes.

  The mystery of the odor baffled me, and the changes in Betty worried me. So, like all modern philosophers, I thought much, drank much, and smoked much over the problem—and arrived nowhere.

  Betty, too, fretted about the perfume because it annoyed me, and about herself because, except for toothache, measles, and similar childish ills, she had never been sick a day in her life. Betty is neither the broken lily nor drooping-violet type of woman. She can shop all morning, go to a matinee, and foxtrot half the night, which is a considerably larger contract than I should care to take on. Also she can handle a canoe like a red Indian, swim like a Sandwich Islander, and play stiff enough tennis to command the respect of any man. And here she was developing nerves and headaches and listlessness, just as though she were an ordinary woman instead of being my wife.

  “I think I’ll go to see Doctor Towbridge,” she announced. “It’s not like me to be all done in at breakfast time.”

  I agreed with her enthusiastically. Next to having no Betty at all, a sick Betty was the worst thing I could imagine.

  When she returned from the doctor’s she was more puzzled than ever. “He couldn’t find anything wrong,” she said, “and that worries me all the more, ‘cause people don’t get this way when there’s nothing the matter with them.”

  Doctor Towbridge and I rode downtown together next morning, and I begged him for some clew to Betty’s indisposition. “Wel-l,” he answered, after the manner of all physicians who find themselves in a tight place, “I don’t know that I’d care to say positively at this time just what Mrs. Haig’s trouble is. Organically she’s as fit as a fiddle, but she seems to be suffering from a lowering of vitality, possibly induced by insomnia. And I discovered traces of hysteria, too.”

  “Insomnia!” I scouted. “Why, man, Betty sleeps like a top; she sleeps as well as I do, and I’m almost as hard to rouse as Lazarus.”

  Doctor Towbridge lit a fresh cigar and stared for a minute at the rows of near-colonial villas racing past the car windows. “Did Mrs. Haig ever walk in her sleep as a child?” he asked. “Somnambulism may have the same effect as insomnia, you know.”

  Now, Betty and I had known each other just three months when we were married; so I had no more idea whether she had walked in her sleep as a child than I had what colored pinafores she wore when she was attending kindergarten. But Doctor Towbridge’s question gave me to think. Suppose Betty were sleepwalking! And our sleeping rooms were on the second floor. Good Lord, if she were to walk through an open window! I determined then and there to do some watchful waiting that night.

  But if the old saying concerning the ultimate destination of good resolutions be true, I must have paved several blocks of infernal highways with mine; for midnight found me in bed, wooing Morpheus in no uncertain nasal tones.

  Two o’clock, though, found me awake; very wide awake.

  I sat up in bed. The big, white November moon, swimming easily in a surf of frothy clouds, splashed an intermittent spray of silver light over the bedroom’s polished floor. Outside the window the wind set
up a shrewish scolding in the branches of the tall chestnut which grew beside the house, and up the stairs drifted the acrid, unmistakable perfume of burning joss sticks.

  I looked at Betty’s bed. The covers were thrown back and there was the dint of her head in the center of her pillow; her kimono hung in its accustomed place across the back of her slipper chair. But Betty was nowhere to be seen.

  “That infernal incense again!” I exclaimed as I scrambled out of bed and hurried to the stairway. “There’s something devilish going on in this house.”

  Half a dozen angry strides took me to the stairhead; two more carried me to the curve of the steps. There I paused, looking down into the evilly grinning face of the stone image. Before it was Betty, clad only in her pajamas and straw bedroom sandals, lighting the last of seven joss punks set fanwise in a vase upon the floor. The stick took fire and sent its writhing coil of smoke upward to the idol’s head, and Betty, with her hands crossed over her breast, her body bent nearly double, retreated three steps, paused, and groveled to the floor; rose and backed away five more steps, repeated the genuflection; then rose to her full height, rigid as a carven thing herself.

  Hands held stiffly at her sides, she continued to stare fixedly into the monster’s agate eyes as she slipped her little pink -and-white feet from their straw sandals and took one step forward barefoot. Raising her hands, palms forward, till they reached the level of her ears, she went to her knees and bent slowly forward till hands and forehead rested on the floor. Once, twice, three times she did this slowly; then her prostrations increased in speed until the soft thud-thud of her head and hands against the floor was like the ticking of a slow-movement clock.

  As she swayed forward and back in this act of mad adoration she recited gaspingly:

  O Fo, the Mighty,

  O Fo, the Powerful,

  O Fo, who holdest the thousand-starred heavens as a sunshade in thy hand,

  O Thou who governest the moon and the tides,

  O Thou who placest the mighty winds upon the great seas,

  O Thou who bendest the skies above the earth, Have pity upon me.

  O Fo, who orderest the sun and all the lights of heaven, O Fo, who makest the lions to roar and the little beasts to keep silence,

  O Fo, who bindest in the lightnings with thy grasp and whose voice is the thunder of the clouds,

  O Fo, who standest upon the white mountaintops and liest down in the green valleys,

  O Fo, who driest up the rivers with thy wrath and encompasseth the dry land with thy floods,

  I lay myself before thee.

  Inch by inch she had crawled on her knees to the idol’s base, and that stone abomination, that misbegotten son of Eastern heathenism, leered triumphantly down while Betty—my Betty—put her soft little lips to its misshapen feet.

  “Hell and furies!” I yelled, covering the distance intervening between Betty and me in a single leap. “I’ll smash that damned image if it’s the last act of my life.”

  Before I put my iconoclastic threat into execution I bent above the wretched woman crouching on the floor, mad enough with berserker rage to grind her underfoot.

  I seized her by the shoulders and wrenched her upright, ready to shake her as an ill-tempered terrier worries a rat. But my vengeance died stillborn. Betty’s eyes stared unseeingly into mine; her face had the set, unwitting expression of one in a hypnotic trance. She was sound asleep with her eyes open; bound fast in the fetters of somnambulism.

  “Betty! Betty, dear,” I whispered contritely, drawing her slender little body to me and nursing her head against my shoulder.

  A shiver ran through her, and her hands gripped my arm till the polished nails bit into my flesh through the sleeve of my robe as she nestled her face close to my breast. “Oh, Phil! Phil, dear, I’ve had such a terrible dream,” she whimpered. “Put your arms around me tight, dear; I’m so frightened.” And her hot tears wet through the silk of my robe.

  With a sobbing, hysterical Betty to comfort and pacify and carry upstairs to bed, I had no time for smashing images that night, but before Betty went to sleep, with my hand cuddled in both of hers, we agreed to oust the stone demon from the house before another night.

  Getting rid of a statue, however, especially one like ours, is often more easily discussed than accomplished. First, the thing weighed nearly two hundred pounds; second, it was fragile to an unbelievable degree and had to be handled as carefully as high explosive; lastly, it had cost us nearly five hundred dollars—and wasn’t entirely paid for. I would gladly have forfeited the unpaid balance for the pleasure of smashing the hateful thing into smithereens; but Betty’s frugal soul revolted at the mere suggestion. Ready as she is to pauperize herself—and me—for new things, Betty would sooner part with an arm than suffer a loss on any article once in her possession.

  Then, too, the image had to be crated and packed before any drayman would consent to handle it; so, pending the time it could be properly prepared for its journey to the auction rooms, we wrapped it in rugs and stood it in a secluded corner of the backyard, where it stared in hooded fury at the blank wall of the garage and attracted the speculative interest of all the small boys in the neighborhood.

  I was forever going to take a day off and box the thing up properly, but like the man who pleaded inclement weather as an excuse for not mending his leaking roof when it was raining, and lack of necessity when the weather was fine, I delayed the operation from day to day, while the image stood unpacked, save for its covering of carpet.

  “You’d better get someone out from the city to crate that thing today,” Betty advised me one morning about three weeks after the statue had been evicted from the house.

  “Um-m?” I answered absently, engrossed in a combination of toast, coffee, and the morning’s paper.

  “Yes, you would,” she repeated, “or I’ll be leaving the house. Look!” She pointed through the dining-room window to the backyard.

  I looked, and set my paper down suddenly, swallowing several mouthfuls of air in quick succession as I did so. “It can’t be!” I ejaculated.

  “But it is,” Betty insisted.

  And it was. The image was nearer the house by twenty feet than it had been the night before.

  “How the devil did it get there?” I asked querulously of nobody in particular.

  “I—I d-don’t know,” Betty faltered. But from the shakiness of her voice and the wideness of her eyes I knew that she had her own opinion.

  “Well, it can’t have walked there, you know,” I argued.

  “N-no, of course not,” Betty agreed a trifle too readily.

  I went out to investigate, not stopping to put on either hat or overcoat. There was no doubt about it; the thing had moved nearer the house since darkness the day before. “Some of the neighborhood boys must have decided to play a joke on us, and moved the thing during the night,” I explained, after looking the ground over. “They probably intended to set it up on the front lawn, but gave it up when they found out how heavy it was.”

  “Yes, that must be it,” Betty concurred rather unsteadily. “It simply couldn’t have walked there itself,” she repeated, as if anxious to convince herself of the impossibility of any such thing having happened.

  With the aid of our Swedish maid, who was as strong as any man and twice as clumsy, we replaced the statue and returned to the house, I to finish my interrupted breakfast, Betty to chirp happily over the details of the dance we were going to attend that night.

  By the time I returned to the house that evening I had developed one of the worst head colds it had ever been my misfortune to acquire, due to my hatless excursion into the yard that morning. Every other breath was followed by a sniff, and each time I spoke the remark was punctuated by a sneeze. In such a condition my attendance at the dance was quite impossible.

  “Another score I owe that cursed image,” I muttered as I discarded the fifth handkerchief I had used that day and unfolded the sixth.

  Betty’s sympath
y for me was matched only by her disappointment at missing the dance.

  “Miss the dance?” I echoed as I brought my seventh handkerchief into play. “Who said you’d have to miss the dance? You can go with Frank and Edith Horton in their car, and they can drop you here on the way home.”

  “And you won’t mind staying here alone, and won’t get sick, old dear?” Betty asked as she picked up the telephone to tell the Hortons to call for her. “Doctor Towbridge will be there tonight, I know, and I’ll bring him home with me, if you wish.”

  I gave the simple homemade cough remedy I was compounding another vigorous shake. “If you bring any sawbones into this house tonight, Betty Haig,” I threatened, “I’ll surely do him bodily injury.” I added a bit more rock candy to the flask of whisky.

  “You’ll be in a state of beastly intoxication when I get back, I know,” Betty said as she viewed my bottle of rock and rye dubiously, “but that doesn’t prevent your tying these ankle ribbons for me now.” And she put a slender, pink satin-shod foot on my knee.

  I laced the ribbons about her trim ankles and kissed her left shoulder blade as I dropped her evening cloak over a party frock which, like Gungha Din’s uniform, “wasn’t nothing much before, and rather less than ‘arf o’ that be’ind.”

  Betty gone, I changed my coat for a house jacket and settled myself on the lounge before the fire to read, smoke, and treat my cold with copious drafts of the mixture I had prepared.

  Efficacious as rock and rye is in the cure of a cold, it has one great disadvantage; it has a tendency to make a man lose count of the number of doses he’s taken. After my seventh or ninth dose—I forget which—I ceased counting, and adhered to the simple formula of a dose to a sneeze—and sometimes I caught myself sneezing without legitimate excuse.

  A couple of hours’ course of this treatment, combined with the sizzle and crackling of the logs burning in the fireplace, set me nodding.